


A Little Understanding (Is A Dangerous Thing)

by horselizard



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: BDSM, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Humor, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 15:38:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horselizard/pseuds/horselizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of the problems of being stranded in Deep Space are easier to solve when you’re computer-generated. But the quality of the solution has a lot to do with the computer who’s generating you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Understanding (Is A Dangerous Thing)

“Lock.”

Rimmer wasn’t sure he’d ever been in these quarters before; maybe once, in those first few months when there was still some eerie entertainment to be had from exploring all those miles of the ship they’d never really been welcome in before the accident. The important thing was that they were far away from the paths his shipmates usually trod (at least, the ones whose movements were anything approaching predictable).

“Holly?” he called in a small voice.

“Hello, Arnold.” Holly’s blonde-fringed face, still a little disconcerting in its unfamiliarity, swam into view on the monitor. “What can I do for you?”

“Er... if you wouldn’t mind, Holly... can this be off the record? I wanted to ask you something rather... private.”

Rimmer could hardly believe he was doing this, but the situation had become difficult to bear. He could see it in the others, too, but at least they had a somewhat wider range of physical stimuli available to them for the purposes of distraction, or experimentation. Maybe... he shuddered to think about it... maybe they were even helping each _other_ out. That kind of fraternization between crew members would be an assault on common decency, and worse, an act of gross unprofessionalism; just the sort of thing that lot would stoop to. Particularly Lister. Oh, god, maybe he was even in the habit of ordering that demented service robot to... service him. Imagine, getting intimate not just with one of the ship's personnel, but with one who was no more than an artificial life-form! He wouldn't put it past him, the curry-sweating pervert...

“Privacy protocols engaged, Arnold. What did you want to ask me?”

Rimmer licked his lips, struggling to think how to broach the topic. He was acutely aware that, with Holly’s track record, she was the last person he should be asking for help with something like this. But there hadn’t been any “accidental interference” with his projection for quite some time now, and so he had hesitantly concluded that under the circumstances, it was worth the risk. Since the incident with the camphor-wood chest, too, she had almost seemed sympathetic towards him. Just as well, really, seeing as the whole smegging affair was basically her stupid fault for being completely incapable of correctly reading her own scanner-scope. He hadn’t as yet berated her for this, though, which he now congratulated himself on, as it was rather useful when one wanted a favour from the gimboid in question.

“Holly. I... that is, my... You see, the thing about being a hologram... I mean, I wondered... There’s not really anything about it in the guide... I don’t know whether you...” He swallowed. “Holly, I’m really smegging horny.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Arn,” replied Holly in her usual laid-back drawl.

“I mean, I know this is... a bit irregular... but is there any chance you could, well, do something for me? Just help me out a bit?” He ploughed on, slipping gently into ‘nervous babbling’ gear. “Maybe give me a breast again? Or, what the hell, why not two? Just for a bit, obviously. Or, or simulate a...” he tried to think of something more satisfying than ‘cold shower’, “a toy of some kind? A hologrammatic one? I mean,” he mused, “if you can simulate an exercise bike, then I don’t suppose a... polythene affair would be too difficult.”

“Arnold.” Holly gently stopped his stream of consciousness and he turned his attention abruptly back to the red-lipped face on the monitor. “Are you asking me for sex?”

Rimmer’s mouth opened and closed gently a few times. “Oh, good lord, I suppose I am,” he gabbled, shocked by considering the implications of what he’d been saying. “Holly, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Just... just forget about it. I didn’t mean that. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, I don’t mind, Arnold.”

Rimmer’s mouth, having carefully tested out both basic positions, decided it preferred ‘open’. “Y... you don’t?” he managed.

“Nah. It’s something to do, innit?” Holly seemed as characteristically unfazed as ever, a state of which Rimmer was becoming increasingly envious. “Besides, I’ve always wondered why you non-mechanicals – oops, pardon, _and_ mechanical simulations of non-mechanicals – are so flippin’ keen on it as an activity. I’m a bit curious, tell you the truth. Wouldn’t mind giving it a go.”

What the hell, Rimmer thought. At least she wasn’t recoiling in judgmental disgust, which meant he was already doing better with her than with 95% of all the women he’d ever come on to (or, at any rate, surreptitiously brushed his elbow against the breast of). “O... okay then. That would be... lovely. Thanks.”

“Right, then. Let me have a quick think. Won’t be a mo.”

Holly disappeared briefly from the screen, and Rimmer straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat, suddenly self-conscious and fidgety now that his request had been met with acceptance. He closed his eyes, and heard the gentle thrum that indicated Holly had reappeared.

“Okay, Arn. Here goes.”

...Touch. _Touch_ , said his simulated neural pathways, so starved of the sensation that it took several seconds before they worked out where. The small of his back, the base of his spine. Fingertips brushing feather-light against bare skin. With a supreme effort, Rimmer managed not to leap away startled, pushing down his shock with a mantra of _it’s okay, it’s only Holly_. But he craned his neck instinctively to see what was going on, and the answer was: nothing. He was still fully clothed, there were no ghostly fingers touching him. It was all in his projection; he marvelled at the wonders of modern holography. It was spooky as smeg for a computer simulation of a human brain to process, though, so he shut his eyes again and tried to tune out the cognitive dissonance, concentrating on giving himself over to the sensation.

The fingertips were still gently tracing a pattern up and down the hollow of his back _–_ letting him get used to it, he supposed. For all her stubborn goitedness and wilful misinterpretations of the simplest commands, Holly was remarkably considerate when she wanted to be. As he relaxed, the touch grew bolder, moving further up his spine and down to... oh gosh... brush the very top of his crack. The lightness of the touch was no longer a courtesy to an underpractised, overstimulated sensory system, but it was becoming a tease, a deliberate holding-off, when what he was tentatively beginning to want was _more_. The very beginnings of an erection stirred in him, his stiffening member starting to push against the confines of his simulated clothes.

Holly observed with detached satisfaction that Rimmer’s nostrils were twitching, and he was getting very forgetful about breathing. She cross-referenced this against the feedback data being generated by his projection, and concluded that this probably meant she was off to a good start. Funny how different he looked when she was doing this to him. He had his eyes shut, for a start, so he couldn’t give her the pompous glare which she’d filed as his most reliable recognition marker. She decided it was probably safe to introduce another stimulus.

Rimmer had started trying to arch into the too-light touch along his spine, which was fruitless, of course, as it was directly connected to his nerve endings, so he was thrilled to feel another ghostly hand alighting on his chest. It rubbed against his pecs with a firm touch and a rhythm deliciously out of sync with the first hand, brushing tantalisingly against his erect nipples, tangling briefly in the small patch of soft curls just over his breastbone. This foreplay was slow, it was oh so slow, but after months, years even, of being untouchable, it was a blissful thrill.

Just as he was getting used to these new motions, a third hand (third hand? Rimmer had to remind himself not to think too hard about this) suddenly began stroking his thigh, and with that came the feeling that his legs, as well as his torso, were bare, gloriously exposed to the fullness of sensation. The pressure against his tight trousers contradicted that feeling, and instinctively Rimmer opened his eyes, looking down to see that he was indeed still fully clad in his immaculate (albeit slightly bulging) green uniform.

The silly sod was, Holly observed as she monitored his psychologically strained reaction, still _thinking_ too much. That wasn’t going to get him anywhere. She would have to up the ante.

The not-hand on Rimmer’s thigh was immediately joined by another not-hand on his other thigh, and the sensation that both not-hands, and as a result quite a lot of his thighs, were slick with a light coating of oil. He closed his eyes again and shut reality out, since it was far less interesting. Particularly now that all four not-hands seemed to be slowly synchronising their motions to gradually converge on his nether regions. The paths of touch along his legs would reach their apex at the top of his thighs just as the rubbing on his chest moved down past his navel and the stroking along his spine reached the curve of his buttocks. Then all four points of contact would move away again, so that he was locked in to a thrillingly frustrating cycle of unfulfilled, ever-increasing anticipation.

Rimmer had, it seemed, now remembered about breathing, but he was doing it all fast and shallow. Holly co-related the data once again and took this as a sign that she’d successfully distracted him from the neurological paradox. Right. Not breathing, or breathing lots. Nostrils twitching. Jaw hanging gently open. Little crinklings around the eyes, like a frown, but not a frown. All very interesting; she noted it carefully. And not just interesting, actually; somehow... just a little bit captivating. Reading human faces was a mildly satisfying pastime, but you tended to get a lot of the same. Now _this_ expression, this expression that was currently sitting so very awkwardly and unnaturally on Rimmer’s face, as though worried that a sneer would come along and shout at it for occupying its pew, it was something a bit special. Yeah, she liked looking at this expression. Could hardly tear herself away, to be honest.

She examined its minute shifts carefully, alongside the peaks and troughs in his projection data and the code that was generating his manipulated sensations. That was the best bit, that bit there. She felt sad when it faded slightly as the sensation-pattern changed. What was it to do with? She decided to experiment a bit.

Rimmer was panting now, unashamedly, Holly’s on-screen presence forgotten. The ghosts of hands swept down past his stomach, up along the well-defined curve of his thighs, down over the dints at the base of his spine, hitting sensitive skin for just a second _–_ the line of his pubic hair, the crease of his thigh, the fold of his buttock _–_ before sweeping away again. This was far more of a build-up than he ever gave himself, and somewhere at the back of his mind he wished he had the willpower to go more slowly, because his neglected erection was thrumming with potential energy in a way he’d never felt before. Fortunately, he was too overwhelmed with sensation for the thought to occur that he was well on the way to having the best sex of his life (or death, or both) with a computer, because it might have annoyed him if it had.

Suddenly, he felt a tugging at his wrists; one of the not-hands (or maybe a fifth not-hand, who was counting?) was pulling them behind his back, gently pushing them together at the base of his spine (a move which didn’t seem at all to obstruct the not-hand that was still stroking up and down his back). He arched his back in unconscious appreciation of this development, and was alarmed when the sensation changed: no longer a gentle pressure persuading his crossed wrists not to move, but a binding of some kind, wide and flat and sturdy, snaking around his forearms and pinning them tightly together.

“Er...” he began, and it came out strangled. _Think, man, think_ , his rational mind urged him, as he unthinkingly strained against the bonds, which caused a strange warm feeling to pool in his gut when they didn’t budge an inch. “Holly...” Yes, _Holly_ , that was it. But before he could get any further, he felt the touch against his thighs changing, becoming rougher... the not-hands, it seemed, had grown not-nails, which were dragging against his skin, surely almost hard enough to draw blood.

Holly watched as Rimmer let out a whine. She would have classed it as “agonized”, but for his feedback data. Yeah, she was definitely getting somewhere. That had been a good guess. And faces were _so_ much more interesting when they didn’t quite match up to the feelings you’d expect from them. At first it was confusing, then if you looked hard you could read the layers, you could see the ghost of a true expression hidden underneath the one that was just an automatic response. Humans developed such silly default subroutines for themselves, she reflected. Made things more fun, though. She liked a challenge.

Rimmer tried instinctively to look down at whatever invisible not-thing was scratching with slow deliberateness down his slippery, sensitive thighs, but he was prevented by something catching in his hair, wrapping its tight grip around his unruly brown curls and pulling his head back. He tried to yelp at the pain, but his simulated breath caught in the long white throat which now lay exposed, and came out of his slack jaw as a ragged whimper.

“Holly, what are you doing?!” he finally managed to blurt out in a moment’s clear-headedness, but it didn’t look like Holly would deign to answer, and as something very like teeth started to nip at his neck, using just not quite enough force to break the skin, he rapidly forgot the question.

 _This is wrong, this is all wrong,_ sang a voice at the back of his mind, as the not-teeth, now accompanied by a not-tongue, moved slowly up to his earlobe, and he felt his nipples being pinched sharply. His genitalia didn’t seem to agree, however, and the voice was drowned out by a recitative of _touch me, touch_ me, _for god’s sake._

Suddenly, the not-teeth withdrew, the sharp nails stopped digging into his legs, and the falsified touch disappeared from everywhere but the strap encircling his wrists and the not-hand still pulling just hard enough to hurt on his hair. The sensations of oiliness and nakedness were replaced by the far more normal sensations of cotton against his torso and tight polyester against his legs, and he gradually came back to himself, satisfied that this nonsense was now nearly over. He had no idea what his cock was so happy about (probably so unused to _any_ kind of sensory stimulus that it would salute anything), but smeg it, he would just go and deal with it himself, as soon as he got Holly to give back full control of his body.

“Holly, I don’t know _what_ you have programmed into your data-banks as sex, but that was not it. Now please let go of me, you useless imbecile.”

Oh, she definitely liked him better when he had his eyes shut.

“But I’m just getting the hang of it,” she protested, in a tone which had no real strength of feeling behind it. It didn’t need to, given that Rimmer had no actual control over what she did to him, and that his readouts clearly gave the lie to his claims that he wanted to be let go of.

“Holly, if you don’t let go of me I’ll oh smegging hell...” He trailed off, his knees sagging, as a firm grasp closed around his aching balls and squeezed, gently, menacingly.

“You’ll what, Arnold?” Holly asked, feeling justified in yielding to the temptation to briefly make herself feel better about the imbecile comment. She was doing him a big favour here, after all.

“Never mind,” Rimmer squeaked, his eyes screwed shut in terror, while his genitalia launched into a counterpoint of _not there, not there, you’re so close_ and _that’ll do, god yes, close enough_.

He groaned with relief as the not-hand withdrew. _Finally, she’s given up_ , he thought, then suddenly he could feel hands tearing at his trousers so that his braces popped undone, tugging at the fly (and oh god, with his erection pressing close against it, _that_ was an experience), and pulling them down to his knees, taking his boxers with them. What the smeg was she doing now, still messing about with his projection to make him feel unreal things? Hadn’t she had enough of... the thought struck him that his stiffie was no longer feeling constrained as it had done throughout Holly’s previous manipulation of his senses, and the not-hand in his hair gave him enough slack to be able to look down. His cheeks grew bright red as he saw his naked cock bobbing up above the hem of his tunic, his long pale legs half-exposed and very definitely _in reality_ pinned together at the knees by his half-mast hologrammatic trousers.

His hands flew immediately to his trousers to pull them back up, or they would have done, if they hadn’t still been firmly tied together behind his back. He struggled desperately to free himself, crouching slightly in a futile attempt at hiding his erection from Holly’s sight, and straightening again with a jolt when he realised that it just made the back of his tunic ride up and further expose his firm round backside.

“Holly, for the last time, what the smeg are you doing?!” he screeched, mortified.

Holly checked the hologram’s readouts again, confident of her answer. “What you asked for, Arnold.”

Rimmer gaped, and while Holly generally enjoyed Rimmer’s ‘furious gaping’ expression when it cropped up, which was moderately regularly if she _–_ and everyone else _–_ was on form, she really did want to see the other one again, you know, the nice one, the _new_ one. So, she propelled Rimmer’s upper body forwards at a speed where his tangled legs were unable to keep up, sending him crashing face-down across the table.

Taken utterly by surprise, and unable to put his bound hands out to break his fall, Rimmer just about had the wherewithal to avoid smashing his nose or chin against the table’s surface (as he had discovered before to his cost, his light bee’s boundary sensor really was unnecessarily good at simulating the correct physics of such an encounter), and he missed by millimetres crushing his throbbing genitalia under himself as he landed. He lay there, shaken, his chest suffering the vague bruise-like sensation that always followed a too-rapid initiation of his boundary sensor’s functions. He had just about recovered from the shock when a stinging slap landed on his bare buttock.

He screamed with pain, and was rewarded with another sharp smack on the opposite buttock. Blows rained thick and fast on his naked backside, slapping over and over again against skin already sore and burning as he gabbled incoherent pleas to Holly to stop, stop, just _stop_. And then she _did_ stop, for just long enough for the aftershock of the brutal spanking to surge agonisingly through his neural pathways, before something long and thin and _painful_ thwacked against the sensitive skin of his upper thighs. He howled, tears pricking his eyes, just before another stripe of white-hot agony was painted across the back of his legs, just below the first.

Holly couldn’t quite see Rimmer’s face as well from this angle, so she forced his head up again by the hair (a pain he hardly noticed against the welt-raising lashes which were landing across his thighs). Oh, that was a _good_ expression. You had to work really hard to make out that certain _je ne sais quoi_ that corresponded properly with his feedback data, but there it was, and getting more intense with every blow he was dealt. He was moaning, shuddering, more or less breaking down in front of her, and she wondered what he... Oh, yes. That.

Rimmer was completely coming apart, overwhelmed by the searing, unrelenting pain of the whip, or cane, or whatever the smeg it wasn’t, and though he was barely able to string two words together, he was begging, _begging_ Holly to take it away. And then, suddenly, he felt a firm pressure close around his straining cock, and his brain exploded into a chorus of _finally, finally, yes_ at the magic of feeling another’s hand on his erection for the first time in three million and too many years.

The blows to his legs stopped, although he was still shaking and sobbing from the vicious pain throbbing through them, and another not-hand started running over the raw flesh of his buttocks and thighs. It sent fresh pain through him with every welt and bruise it touched, echoed in a sharp squeeze on his cock every time he winced or yelped. The not-hand on his hyper-sensitised erection pumped roughly at it, while the other started to feel slick and oily again, cooling his tender skin slightly, but also starting to delve further between his legs - rubbing against his inner thighs, stroking along his perineum. The contrast as it moved rapidly between skin that was unbearably sore and skin that was excitingly sensitive was dizzying, and he whined at the onslaught of sensations.

He should have seen it coming, the slippery not-hand bunching up three not-fingers and forcing their way past his tight ring of muscle. As it was, it came as a complete shock to feel something up inside him, and a hoarse scream dragged itself from his throat as sparks shot across his vision. He tried to struggle away from the sudden sharp pain _–_ useless though he rationally knew the attempt would be, but rationality wasn’t getting much of a look-in in his thought processes at that moment. But an unyielding pressure in the middle of his back kept him firmly in his prone position, utterly at the mercy of whatever simulated thing was invading his most private orifice.

Rimmer was gritting his teeth, eyes screwed shut and face contorted in a grimace, and he was just as tensed up everywhere else, too. Holly was perturbed. Maybe she’d done the wrong thing... but she was sure this was _meant_ to work. She checked her code again. Oh, _that_ was it! Wrong angle! Of course. Forgot to carry the one. Ah well, got there in the end.

The intruding object suddenly twisted slightly in its back-and-forth motion, and sparks filled Rimmer’s vision once more, but this time, it was because it had hit a part of his simulated anatomy which seemed to be hard-wired for pure, hedonistic ecstasy. A noise he had never made before dragged itself from his unsuspecting throat, a primal howl of delirious pleasure and desperate, desperate need. The not-hand continued to thrust against it, hard and fast, and every second it moved away was an eternity of torturous anticipation.

All he could think was _more_ , he wanted _more_ , and his cock was hard as steel in the rough, fast-moving grasp of the other not-hand. Somewhere in his subconscious bubbled the half-formulated thought that this miraculous little bit of anatomy _had_ to be new, and it was a smegging mystery why the developers of holography had thought to put it _there_ , and what for.

Holly stared, and stared, only a fraction of her active processing power still engaged in her manipulations of Rimmer's projection. The rest of it was somewhat preoccupied.

Incoherent, babbling syllables poured from Rimmer's mouth, curses and entreaties and outpourings of gratitude jumbled together with senseless, dumbstruck moans. The overwhelming initial shock of the anal stimulation had subsided a little now, but its effect on him wasn't becoming any weaker; rather, his focus on it was becoming stronger. He rocked against it, against the grip on his erection, every ounce of concentration devoted to sandwiching himself perfectly between those two searing nodes of sensual pleasure.

Finally, Holly forced herself to turn her attention back to Rimmer's feedback data, and realised with a start that she had done so not a moment too soon. It was time to switch back to manual. Some pretty nifty manoeuvres were called for, but she thought she could pull them off. Quite exciting, all this was. Especially since it seemed she wasn't half bad at it. 

Rimmer was gasping, crying out, driven wild with stimulation, and it was almost too much; then the thrusting inside him slowed, the grip on his cock grew gentler, and he sank into this new, calmer tempo with a mixture of exhausted relief, and bereft frustration. Now, it was not enough, and an unbearable tension welled up within him. He humped frantically against the not-hands, desperate to regain what they had been making him feel, and almost wept with joy when, slowly but surely, their motions once again grew faster, and harder.

This time, everything moved in a rare and beautiful harmony, rhythms building in perfect time, and pleasure spreading to every nerve of his body. He was overcome, brimming with sensation, wishing this would never end, but relishing the knowledge that it soon would, and the finale would be grand to say the least.

Then, just as he was certain he couldn't hold on any longer, could no longer dam what was building up inside him, the motions stopped, and he was held, plateauing, for just a second more than he thought could ever be possible. In a brief moment of full, clear consciousness, he just had time to think, with a sudden wry pang, _Oh God, I'm being buggered across a table._

And then, suddenly, the lightest, briefest simulation of a sensation brushed along the underside of his aching cock, and it was enough to tip him over the edge. He bucked and shuddered, a long-drawn-out groan escaping from deep in his throat, as hologrammatic semen pumped out of his shaft to disappear unnoticed, all parties involved indifferent to its fate. The gentle pressure on the small of his back kept him firmly bent over as he rode the waves of orgasm, coaxing him almost, unwilling to break contact until he was thoroughly spent.

Little by little, the simulated fingers entwined in his hair withdrew, the tight binding around his forearms uncoiled itself into nothingness, and the not-hand penetrating him slowly eased itself out. Rimmer slumped bonelessly across the table, gasping for air he didn't need, gradually coming back to a self that would be horrified to think how much he had enjoyed... whatever _that_ was.

“How was that, Arn?” Holly asked matter-of-factly.

“Mfrgl,” Rimmer mumbled uselessly into the table.

“Seemed to work, anyway,” she said with satisfaction.

That much, at least, was true. He hadn't felt this sated in a long time – and he couldn't bear to consider what _that_ was supposed to imply. It would be a while before he needed to ask that favour of Holly again. A long, _long_ while, with any luck.

He managed to gather the energy to raise his head, and noticed that a few strands of Holly's neat blonde bob had fallen out of place, her eyes sparkling a little more wildly than usual as they fixed themselves on Rimmer's flushed, wracked face.

“You know,” she mused, “I think I'm beginning to see what all the fuss is about.”

Rimmer had just managed to shakily drag himself upright when a sudden clang behind him made him spin round in alarm. One of the storage lockers set against the wall had been flung open, and he watched in horror as a familiar figure uncurled itself gracefully from the tiny cubbyhole formed by the top shelf, dropped out of the locker in a forward roll and landed effortlessly on its feet.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Goalpost Head?” the Cat exclaimed, as Rimmer clutched at his privates, mortified. “How am I supposed to nap with you howling away like someone just slammed a door on your tail?”

“H... h... how was I to know you were up there, you... moronic moggy?!” Rimmer shrieked, gamely making a bid for verbally-cutting superiority. He couldn't quite put his usual disdainful weight behind the remarks, though, when he was unable to stop glancing nervously down at himself, desperately weighing up the need to pull up his trousers against the risk that he wouldn't be able to keep himself covered with one hand.

The Cat just stared at him uncomprehendingly. “Why _wouldn't_ anyone know?” he scoffed. “Man, those noises were unbelievable! I shoulda thrown a shoe at you. But I wouldn't wanna waste a Cuban heel of _this_ calibre on the likes of _you_.”

He sneered at Rimmer for as long as he could bear the sight of him, then wheeled round in disgust, palmed the door open, and swept out of the room with a yowl. Scarlet with embarrassment, and utterly speechless, all Rimmer could do was fumble furiously with his trousers until he was just about decent – even if he was, so to speak, closing the flap after the cat had bolted.

“Holly,” he eventually spluttered at the calm face on the bunkroom monitor, “was he there... the whole time?”

“Course he was, Arn,” she said in her usual phlegmatic way. Involuntarily, Rimmer's hand curled into a fist, and he had to struggle hard against the urge to stuff it in his mouth.

“Why,” he began, his voice trembling, “didn't you _tell_ me?!”

“You never asked,” she replied innocently.

The expressions he was starting to make now were definitely ones she'd seen before. No doubt the words would be ones she'd heard before, too. No matter. She'd had a feeling she wasn't going to get to see those _other_ expressions again anyway; not for a long while, at least. Funny, that: the way doing something totally, flawlessly _right_ could get you nowhere just the same as screwing it up completely. At least where _he_ was concerned. Didn't give you much in the way of motivation, to be honest.

 _Still_ , she thought, idly ignoring Rimmer's incandescent ranting in favour of doing a little judicious filing in her memory banks, _it was nice while it lasted_.


End file.
